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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Learning is something we all do, but we disagree on how to do it effectively. Today we'll examine the popular misconception that people learn best when they're taught in a preferred learning style. We like learning, right, Emily?
Emily:Yes, love to learn.
Karla:Yeah, you know, something we don't share a lot that's maybe different than other occupations is as a college professor, we teach in these fifteen week chunks. We get to start over with new students and new classes. And we do learning all the time. We're always learning. It's like we get to restart and stop.
Karla:And we're forever students, aren't we, Emily?
Emily:It's really the best thing about a job as a professor I constantly get to find new information and think about what is cool about it and how do I explain it to other people. I absolutely am a forever student.
Karla:Yeah, I have a son and even though our semester is over, going back to when he started seventh grade in the fall, in seventh grade, we might know this because our students do a lot of homework essentially in college. But did you know they really don't do homework anymore in middle school?
Emily:Really?
Karla:They don't bring stuff home. And so there's only really one way for parents to get engaged in work. And we have this electronic portal. We go into this portal and we can see their teachers, their assignments, whether they have something missing or not. And that's kind of our inlet to what we're doing, what he's doing in the classroom.
Karla:So I'm an interested parent, a little bit.
Emily:Very good. *Laughter*
Karla:And when he starts the year, I don't want to meddle too much, but looking at his classes, I see that he's got this class for student success, and I'm intrigued. We want our students to be successful. And he's learning this in seventh grade, that's awesome.
Karla:I look through some of the content and I see that he spent a couple days learning about how to be a successful student by developing his learning style. And his teacher has given them some sort of survey to figure out how he learns best, what methods they might be, whether it's visual or through kinesthetics or through auditory. And this gives me pause. You've heard about learning style preferences, have you, Emily?
Emily:Absolutely. I don't remember myself being taught about learning style preferences when I was younger, but I hear it all the time from my students. I tend to give them assignment guidelines that like break down, it's written out what the different steps of the assignments needs to be. And every now then I hear from students, "oh, I just couldn't follow that. That's not how I learn. I want information in a different way."
Emily:Or I'm teaching online classes and it's just recordings, but maybe not videos. So yes, I hear often from my students that they have a specific learning style or they want information that goes along with it.
Karla:I'm Karla Lassonde and I'm a cognitive psychologist.
Emily:And I'm Emily Stark and I'm a social psychologist. And you are listening to Brains vs. Beliefs: Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Karla:Today we're going to be talking about the common misconception that people learn best when they are taught in their preferred learning style. We do like learning a certain way. I mean, Emily, you have to have a preference, right?
Emily:I do. I don't love it when places where I'm trying to learn something, maybe like setting up the technology for this podcast, don't link me to a video where I have to watch for five minutes. I want the steps written out for me. And then I feel that's easier for me to follow what's happening, to pay attention to it.
Karla:Yeah, I mean, we have preferences. We're human. We learn to write and read and do things that are best for us. Some people really enjoy looking at an image when they're learning something. And really, there's lots of ways to have these preferences.
Karla:And so we often hear of things like pictures, writing, listening, as the ways that people will attach to how they learn best. And Emily, this idea is all over the place. It's all over the place. And there's some reports that about 90% of teachers, when asked if they should be teaching toward learning styles, they really think this is true. And in fact, a lot of U. S. Educators are learning about this in their teacher training.
Emily:90%. Wow, that is huge.
Karla:An individual by the name of Thomas Fallace, he started looking at what he called the typology of learners. And typology is a fancy word for things like personality styles or categories of traits that a lot of people are really familiar with when they think about psychology. So the same idea is that you might be extroverted or introverted was overlaid on this idea that you are a certain type of learner. And the learning was this thing called a VAK learner, which is kind... of sounds strange.
Emily:Sounds like a monster.
Karla:Yeah, it's like a visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Those were the three main ideas that this individual Thomas came up with.
Emily:So visual would mean I want to see things happening. Auditory, I'm going to want to hear about it. And kinesthetic is when it gets to I need to do it myself to learn.
Karla:Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, if I'm fixing a car, I definitely want to have my hands in there.
Emily:Yes. Yeah.
Karla:Fixing a car. This sounds reasonable.
Karla:It's a reasonable idea for learning. What often happens is we have this transition of early psychology coming from Germany over to The United States. And this is what happened in the case of the concept of learning styles. And unfortunately, instead of looking at how all folks learn best, they were looking specifically at some remedial reading instruction for students with learning disabilities. And you can imagine when you're trying to work on improving people's learning, you're going to go to some new strategies.
Karla:And that started to develop this idea that perhaps if folks are falling behind in their learning, we need to do something more prescriptive or more specific, like learning styles. Moving on.
Emily:Makes sense, yeah?
Karla:Yeah. For sure. And a really main researcher in the field of learning style match is Rita Dunn, a professor of education, a consultant in education and author.
Karla:She put this learning style framework into real popularization in the 70s and 80s. And what a lot of folks think about when you think of psychology is the survey, right, Emily?
Emily:Absolutely. Yep.
Karla:So she does what a lot of psychologists do really well. She creates the learning style inventory.
Karla:And inventory is this fancy word for we're going to ask you a series of questions. And at the end of that, we're going to make some sort of assessment that we can adapt. And actually this early on was not without controversy, Emily. Some other scholars in education, they thought that the idea might gain massive appeal, but they were trying to put the brakes on. Like, is this really something that we want to adapt to all learners?
Karla:And you wouldn't believe it, but it gained a lot of media coverage.
Emily:Yeah. I feel like I remember this from the 1990s, which would make sense. Everyone thinks learning styles. That's the key to fixing education. We just got to pay attention to learning styles.
Karla:Yeah, and we want to latch on to something to make people successful learners. Absolutely. Quickly, due to this research, more than half of the states included learning style instruction in their licensure testing. In other words, preparing their teachers as they're doing their teacher training. This is an important part of how they're going to go out into the field and work with students.
Karla:And a large study not too many years ago in 2016 found that 67% of teacher preparation actually still included the learning style mentality into lesson plans.
Emily:Wow, 67%. That is tons of people.
Karla:Yeah, so if you can imagine, I mean, it's got to be so hard to be a K-12 educator.
Emily:Oh, I don't even want to imagine.
Karla:I mean, we're teaching college students because that's where we feel our sweet spot is.
Emily:Absolutely. Yes.
Karla:You can imagine these teachers are going into a third grade classroom. I don't want to do it, but they're confronted with students. They're all kinds of energy, all kinds of different learning abilities. And in addition to teaching them what they're supposed to learn, now they're going to try to find out who has what learning style and how they can kind of manipulate the lesson of the day to match that.
Karla:That seems a little bit exhausting, a little bit overwhelming. But anyway, this is how the background of the learning style misconception initially developed.
Emily:Interesting. So we came up with these three styles and now we're teaching teachers that, all right, you have to develop and design your teaching to match all of these styles for students. That absolutely sounds like making a classroom even more of a circus than it can be sometimes.
Karla:Yeah, so we're going to find out whether this is going to work out for those teachers or not. We're going to talk about the truth, Emily.
Emily:Does this actually work? Has this improved the learning of all of America's children?
Karla:Unfortunately, the research speaks and there's really no strong evidence supporting the effectiveness of teaching to match individual learning styles. And you don't have to take it from me. We're going to listen to Doctor Tesia Marshik. She's going to do a TED Talk.
Karla:Everyone likes TED Talks. And so here's a clip of what she has to say about the conclusion of whether teaching styles should match our preferences.
TED talk clip:In fact, there have been several meta analysis papers where they've looked at all the research on this topic for forty years, and all of them have concluded the same thing, that there's still no evidence that matching teaching styles to supposed learning styles or students preferences actually makes a difference. But I would encourage you to look up some of this research on your own.
Karla:All right, what's the main point? We all have preferences in terms of how we want to learn. However, in terms of how we should learn, there really is a way. There really are ways that people can improve their learning. It has to do with paying attention to information and detail.
Karla:It has to do with practice, right? If we're going back to fixing a car, I don't know anything about fixing a car, but if I wanted to learn, I couldn't only read the instructional manual or listen to an audio tape. I would definitely have to do hands on learning. And that's not necessarily because it's my preference. It's because that's how I'm going to practice and all these things about memory come to bear.
Karla:The way to fix a car becomes more automatic. So what we need to understand as educators is what is the actual outcome? What do we want to know? So we start with the end game of what is the knowledge that we need to learn? And then we can work backwards, talk about in my area, some practices in memory and attention, and look at how we learn for meaning and understanding.
Emily:That absolutely makes sense. Even though I don't love watching instructional videos to learn things and sometimes just want it all written down, there are definitely times where I also need the video. I'm a dancer and if I'm learning any type of movement, I mean, yeah, you can't just explain that to me. In that case, I would need to see it being done and then I can learn it more easily. But if I'm trying to learn something more technical and detailed, then yes, I prefer to have the steps written out.
Emily:So of course that makes sense. So it's about the goal or the objective of learning and the type of content that we're learning. That this idea that I need to have things explained to me only in the way that matches my preference, and that's the best way for me, just doesn't make sense. That doesn't hold up with my own experiences.
Karla:I'm so glad you agree. *Laughter*
Karla:I'm not a dancer, but if I was learning yoga, I mean, the same thing applies. I might pull out my yoga card. Some people have these fun decks of cards.
Emily:Oh, yes. Yeah, I've seen that.
Karla:Do the yoga pose of the day and I can hold the card. I can look at the card. It does have an image, but eventually I have to get down on the yoga mat and I have to move my body and trial and error figure this out. Right? So there's that kinesthetic element, which is really important for making sure I'm doing yoga appropriately.
Karla:The same is definitely true for you in dance.
Emily:Absolutely. Though I still hear it from my students and as a professor, I definitely see differences in my students. Some of them are really good at following detailed assignment descriptions and some are less skilled at that. So what can I say to them when they're telling me, Oh no, no, no, I need this information in a different way for me to learn it?
Karla:I think that's so valid. And what we're saying here is that it's a misconception to have the match. But absolutely, people have preferences. And we kind of create our lives in ways- we seek out careers that are more oriented to, you know, if we're a graphic designer, if we're an artist, if we're a technical writer. And you can drill those things down and you can really understand that, yeah, some of them do contain more writing and some do contain more creative visualization.
Karla:And it's okay. It's okay to to have these preferences. And but we really can't demand the match. And we can't be a whole room of people saying this is my preference, but we certainly can shape how we get motivated to learn, how we feel good about learning. And we can keep some of those preferences in the back of our mind for sure.
Karla:And let me explain a little bit about why this match isn't appropriate. So if I'm going to present you with a list of words that I want you to remember, this is very common in memory research, right?
Emily:Absolutely.
Karla:We have something called short term memory where we look at how much can people remember in a very short amount of time. And what we know is that it's not much.
Emily:That's true.
Karla:That people really beat up on themselves for having a poor memory. And we've heard this adage, it's been used in psychology for years, that we remember about five give or take two items. So when it comes to a word list, I'm a let's say I'm a visual learner, Emily, and I'm going to approach this word list and say, well, I want pictures of the words. I don't want the word written. I want to see the bird.
Karla:And so they've actually done studies like this where they allow people to move forward in learning a word list with their preference. So I see all the pictures and then at the test, allegedly I would do better if I'm tested using the same pictures.
Emily:Yeah. Because it matched your learning style, right?
Karla:Yeah. And in research there has to be a control. And so there would be some groups matching in some of ways and there'd be other groups matching in other ways, but then they'd switch the modality. And what that means is they would take the test and learning event and they would make one not match your preferred learning style.
Karla:And the short end of the story is people do not remember more words when they're learned and remembered in their preference. Okay?
Emily:Pretty clear findings for this. Yes.
Karla:Yeah. And you might say, well, that's not adaptive to all of learning, but it's really, we look at these core features of how memory works. And that's what we mean by saying, how should we learn? How ought we learn? And going back to the pictures and the words, if I'm teaching a three year old about dogs, then I probably do want to show them the word.
Karla:I probably do want to show them about dogs and what they look like. So we're not saying again that these different modalities are bad. It's just that we don't need there to be that alignment or that a preference where people get stuck on knowing that they learn best in that way.
Emily:That makes sense. And that getting stuck on, I think is key. I hear that also from my students and see it in myself, where I think, oh, I need this to be an exact certain way for me to do well. And that's just me not really understanding sometimes how my brain is going to make sense of information. And that really probably getting information in multiple ways or pushing myself to try something different might be just as an effective way to learn.
Karla:Yeah. And let's go and give credit back to those K through 12 teachers.
Emily:Absolutely.
Karla:They're doing a great job. They are taking on the education of our future minds, right? And we eventually get those students in college.
Emily:Yes.
Karla:So we know it all links together.
Karla:And what those teachers are really doing in most of their training is they're saying, I want my student to learn about addition or subtraction. And so we're going to figure out what is the knowledge and we're going to test them that way. And so even though they may have this match pedagogy as part of their teaching, I believe that they wash it out in the long run too. And it's just something that we need to kind of eradicate as saying that this is a real tool to make someone a better learner.
Emily:Great. Because yeah, teachers have hard enough jobs already without having to present their content in a bunch of different ways to map onto their students. So let me make sure that I am understanding the key takeaways here, right? So while we maybe do have learning preferences and many people prefer information to be displayed or delivered to them in a specific way, there is no scientific evidence that teaching to those specific learning styles or matching that teaching improves the learning outcomes. It's not leading me to learn something faster, I'm not going to remember more of it.
Emily:That is not what's key to affecting my learning. So we need to be focusing on what the research says for how to teach different topics, different subjects, different types of things.
Karla:Emily, you're such a fast learner.
Karla:You're pretty awesome. Yes, going back to the evidence base. That's what we as psychological scientists, we want to do the best, and we want to present that to you. The next time you hear that learning is best when matched to a preferred style, feel free to tell your friends and even tell those educators sensitively that it's not true and it's not effective.
Karla:You've heard it here on Brains vs. Beliefs.
Emily:You can learn more about this podcast on our website called https://www.communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes and follow Brains vs. Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.